“That’s the Beaufort River,” he said to my unasked question. “You can see it from your house.”
I nodded to show I’d heard, then followed him for a short distance until he stopped in front of a black Lincoln Town Car.
He opened the door and stood back. “It’s a hot one, that’s for sure. Don’t touch any metal, and I’ll get the air-conditioning going right away.” He pressed a button on his key fob and the car windows lowered. I breathed deeply, trying to catch a cross breeze as it moved through the car. “This Lowcountry heat takes a bit of getting used to,” he said apologetically as he started the engine.
He drove slowly, so slowly that I found myself pressing an imaginary accelerator on the floorboard in front of me. Not that he could have driven faster. Everybody else seemed content to plod along at or below the speed limit. We left the downtown area as we drove parallel to the river, where the houses became larger and older, with lush gardens full of unfamiliar blooms that most likely couldn’t survive a New England winter. The reds and pinks seemed brighter, the greens deeper, as if I’d stumbled into an exotic, foreign place. Compared to my small, three-bedroom, midcentury ranch, I realized I probably had.
I spotted an enormous tree whose trunk seemed as wide as the Lincoln, and whose branches were dressed in frothy green moss. It was something out of a movie set, and I half expected to see a woman in a corset and hoop skirt step out from behind it. I was so busy staring at it that I was barely aware of Mr. Williams pulling into a gravel driveway leading to a detached garage with a drooping roof. The bays had tall, arched entrances, making me think it had once been a carriage house. Only the bravest or best insured would actually park a vehicle inside it.
But the garage was quickly forgotten as my attention was drawn to the enormous house that dwarfed it. Six large Doric columns supported double porches the width of the house and a hipped roof with three visible chimneys. The porch railings and spindles had once been white, but now were mostly peeling. Several spindles were missing, making the porches resemble Halloween jack-o’-lanterns. Divided steps made out of what appeared to be cement led up to the front porch from a raised basement and to a massive front door that hadn’t seen a coat of paint for decades. A clear fanlight with a cracked pane and rectangular glass sidelights surrounded the door, the glass murky, as if passing time had left its fingerprints in a layer of dirt.
I stood beneath a limb of the enormous oak tree, relishing the respite from the beating sun, and stepped back to see two dormer windows in the roof, possibly in an attic, and I wondered how hot it would be now in the middle of summer. A lone air-conditioning unit in an upstairs window flipped on, disturbing the quiet.
I looked up at the house and it seemed to be considering me, too. A broken path led around to the side, where a wooden door with peeling white paint sat within a high wall with crumbling plaster, blocking my view of what lay behind it. A flowering vine had flung itself over the top of the wall like an escaping prisoner. There was an air of expectation, a held breath, as if the house and I were both waiting for something to happen.
“The house is in good structural shape, although, as you can see, there are quite a few aesthetic issues. Edith’s husband died in 1955—in a car accident—and I don’t believe she made a single improvement to the house since. I’m afraid there’s no central air, but there is indoor plumbing, of course, and a functional kitchen.” He rubbed his hands together like a father trying to convince a child that a piece of fruit was just as desirable as a candy bar. Mr. Williams continued. “If you’ll turn around, you’ll see the real beauty of the property.”
I felt reluctant to turn my back on the house, but I did and quickly understood what Mr. Williams had meant. The house had been built on a rise that afforded a wide vista of the river, the view framed by the thick-trunked oaks and their shawls of moss.